House Builder: First Job
...is a crafting simulator. Build a shelter in the northern ice lands or the African jungle, using basic material from your surroundings.
⚙ Game Description & Mechanics ⚙
Two locations are made available for you to choose from, although the game implied that you start with Greenland and then move to Middle-Africa. Both offer a very different building style: the igloo requires that you to keep a warm fire burning while gathering ice blocks cut from the ground, and a mudbrick house made requiring rocks for the foundation, bamboo sticks and vines for the structure and clay and water for the walls and roof. Both locations have a dangerous beast lurking around (a bear in the first, a lion in the second) from which you need to keep your distance of.
You're walked through the process of gathering different materials and placing them in a 3D blueprint of the house you're building, step by step. Crafting tools are at your disposal from the start, but the tutorial-like nature of the game will tell you when you need to pick them up and even point you to them. With each piece you craft and each one you place, you gain experience points that will unlock skills that allow you to move faster, or craft more bricks and place them faster.
☺ What I enjoyed ☺
As a fan of crafting survivals, I like gathering material from nature, transform them into building material, and build up the house. Instead of just "placing walls", you need to put the structure, attach it, and build up the wall brick by brick. It's a different experience from having enough "pieces of wood" in your inventory to spawn a fully assembled wood wall, roof or door.
The idea behind the process is to be realistic, even though it's simplified to make it a game (which makes sense). For the igloo, you actually look for exposed ice and drag your knife around to carve out the ice block, and after a while you need to find additional sources. The more complex jungle house requires to you cut bamboo trees and gather vines to create the frame, gather the clay and water to mix in a basket, create mud balls and put them in a mold for the wall bricks, or a different mold prior to cooking them in a furnace for the roof. While the real-life process takes much longer, it's actually how it's done.
☹ What bothered me ☹
I have no idea why this is published as a standalone game. It is not a story-based prologue to the main game, it does not offer unique levels of its own, it's merely the first two levels of the main game, and the world map is littered with "Add to wishlish" buttons. It's basically what we called a Shareware some 30 years ago. Steam's store platform already offers the option of having a Demo directly on the real game's store front, and this is what it should've been.
The game is so streamlined that it shames the real-life process. Making mudbricks is a tedious process, but the game actually acknowledges its tediousness by giving you skills that allow "additional production": have 2, 6, even 20 bricks spawn from putting a single mud ball in the mold, basically skipping the whole point of the game.
Don't expect any customization, decision-making or even risk. All the material you need is located in the immediate vicinity, you don't even get to craft the knife or primitive axe! You're forced into a specific blueprint (no creative decision allowed) and a specific progression: don't even try to put mid bricks before you've attached the roof with vines, the possibility simply isn't there. And the dangerous beast lurking about? You just need to keep away. It'll growl if you get too close, but it won't chase you, it won't hunt you, it's just stay there or walk in a wide circle around you.
My Verdict: ★★☆☆☆ - "Forget it."
An hour of gameplay is all it took to finish this Demo, and I'm afraid it isn't enticing me to get the full game. While I have no doubt that modern houses will be more complex to build, the primitive ones on display in
House Builder: First Job don't address the intricacies of electricals, plumbing or isolation, and instead gives all the appearances of being another one of those half-baked simulators Steam is already full of.
P.S.: I'd like to clarify that this isn't a review of the full House Builder game, only of this First Job Demo. I think this Demo doesn't demonstrate the worth of the full game, doesn't showcase the complexity it may (or may not) have, and doesn't particularly make me want to purchase the full game. The House Builder experience of the full game, once it's out of Early Access may end up being quite different, perhaps even enjoyable.
—————————————————————————
This was just my opinion.
If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.
